Authors, Latin -- Biography; Cicero, Marcus Tullius; Statesmen -- Rome -- Biography
It is necessary here, in this chapter devoted to the education of
Cicero, to allude to his two first speeches, because that education was
not completed till afterward--so that they may be regarded as
experiments, or trials, as it were, of his force and sufficiency. "Not
content with these teachers"--teachers who had come to Rome from Greece
and Asia--"he had travelled through Greece and Asia, so as to embrace
the whole world of art." These words, quoted a few pages back from the
treatise attributed to Tacitus, refer to a passage in the Brutus in
which Cicero makes a statement to that effect. "When I reached
Athens,[45] I passed six months with Antiochus, by far the best known
and most erudite of the teachers of the old Academy, and with him, as my
great authority and master, I renewed that study of philosophy which I
had never abandoned--which from my boyhood I had followed with always
increasing success. At the same time I practised oratory laboriously
with Demetrius Syrus, also at Athens, a well-known and by no means
incapable master of the art of speaking. After that I wandered over all
Asia, and came across the best orators there, with whom I practised,
enjoying their willing assistance." There is more of it, which need not
be repeated verbatim, giving the names of those who aided him in Asia:
Menippus of Stratonice--who, he says, was sweet enough to have belonged
himself to Athens--with Dionysius of Magnesia, with [OE]schilus of Cnidos,
and with Xenocles of Adramyttium. Then at Rhodes he came across his old
friend Molo, and applied himself again to the teaching of his former
master. Quintilian explains to us how this was done with a purpose, so
that the young orator, when he had made a first attempt with his
half-fledged wings in the courts, might go back to his masters for
awhile[46].
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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